Internal Solid state disk - SSD

SSD just what do you need to put one in your computer, desktop or laptop?

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Can you use a Solid State Drive (SSD) as your startup or boot drive?  Absolutely!

What would you trade you mechanical hard drive for? One that didn't make any noise? Or could not be damage it by dropping it? A new SSD is the answer!

A Solid State Disk is NOT a hard drive, it does not have any "disks" inside it. It is pure memory, no mechanical parts what ever... Do not confuse the older hard drive or hard disk with a SSD.

Memory sticks or USB Pen drives have been around for some time. And Solid State Disk has been a dream for a long time that has now came true and the capacity is large enough and cheap enough to accommodate your Operating System.

With a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of over 1.5 Million hours and NO moving parts this is the wave of the future today!

And they are fast! Just about as fast as the memory in your computer. Can you say instant on? Or very close to it considering how long it takes to load a Operating System from a mechanical hard drive regardless of the speed.

Think about it - is my hard drive running? Don't know can't hear the platters spinning! What happens if you drop it? Uhhhhh, nothing! Well if you dropped it from the third floor of you office building it wouldn't be worth much but if it slipped out of your hand and hit the floor it would not break!

So what good is this new technology? What can I use it for?

What is the storage capacity of your laptop hard drive? 240? 500 GB? one, two, or four Tetra bytes? You can get a 240 GB (Giga Byte) drive for less then same price as a replacement 240 gig hard drive. The one I am reviewing is a 2.5 inch 32 gig SSD and it sells for less than $100. I know you can get a 500 gig 3.5 inch SATA hard drive for you desktop for less but it has some moving parts, this does not have any moving parts! Less heat, no noise, lower chance of failure. And as time goes on the size of a SSD will increase and the price will come down.

Question: How many SSD's can you have in a computer?

Answer: How many bays do you have? A laptop is limited by space in the case, where as a desktop may have as many as 15 bays that a hard drive or SSD can be installed in.

Question: Can you have a SSD as your boot drive and a hard drive for your data storage?

Answer: Yes you can, you could have one or two SSD's and as many hard drives as you have open bays for. Your only constraint is the interface connections on your motherboard!

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The possibilities are limitless, install your OS on the drive, pull it out of your desktop and put it in your pocket, or your laptop computer case and no one can tamper with your data. Real 'Plug and Play'.

Or maybe you are an experimenter, have two or three drives with different Operating Systems loaded on each one, power down the computer and change the drive, power up and your back in business. This is a possibility now with the what is called a removable drive tray but it requires time to take the current drive out of the tray and put in the new one taking a chance on damaging the drive connectors. (In reality this isn't as good as having a drive large enough to do a multi boot setup with all the Operating Systems on the same drive).

Featured: OCZ  32Gig OCZSSD2-1C32G Internal Solid state disk (SSD) By Newegg.com

Consider this:

Now that the size of the SSD reaches 4 TB and you have three of them you could do a RAID array with a 12 Tetra bytes of storage. And with 1.5 Million hours between failures you would never have to buy another drive, unless of course 12 Tetra bytes of storage became to small... :)

Read this article about using this type of drive in your computer.

Note: When I wrote this article in Dec of 2008 Solid state disk - SSD had been on the market for about six months. Now six years later and Intel has jumped in to the game. The new Intel drives are faster, larger, but as of yet still not cheaper.

The drive featured in this article is still going strong and has not caused me any problems, I have since upgraded three laptops with SSD IDE drives (which are getting harder to find everyday) and none of those drives have caused me any problems. However one drive did cause me problems read the Solid state disk - fail!

Dec 2010

After two years my OCZ SATA II 64 Gig drive has failed. I am giving OCZ Tech and Customer support a zero because they have failed to respond to my query about repair of the drive. Even though OCZ has some good products if they will not support them once they have sold them to the public what good is buying a product that may fail just after the warranty expires?

For comparison I have three (non OCZ) IDE SSD drives that are over three years old in laptops with out any problems..

June 2013

I found out the cause of the failure of the OCZ SATA II 64 GB SSD: Defragmenting the drive. If you have a SSD do NOT defragment the drive. It will corrupt the data to a point where the only way to recover the use of the drive is to delete the partitions on the drive. This one was defragged, the next power on the drive failed to initialize.

I found  a solution to my failed SSD, I did not get it from OCZ or any where on the internet. I figured it out myself: The only way I could get it to initialize was to install it in another computer with out any other drives and use a boot CD to delete the partitions and recreate it.

Note: I have consolidated all questions asked about SSD's in from the [old] Q and A forum on this web site, all the questions with answers are here:  SSD a Few Questions, a Few Answers

Update 02/25/20 - Since this article was written the capacity has increased to over 4 Tetra Bytes! The cost has came down to a point where you can get a SSD for about 0.13 cents (USD) per gig, in some cases that is cheaper than a hard drive, however as always check the manufacture: "Buy Cheap, Get Cheap!"